Disclaimer
Mind: it's a draft... so it's "work in progress." yada yada yada...
These are my thoughts on this draft which at the time of writing this is 1 day old.
But IPv6...?
Didn't saw a success since 1998 when it was released as also declared here:
IPv6 [RFC8200] was developed to address exhaustion. After 25 years of standardisation and deployment effort IPv6 carries a minority of global internet traffic. The dual-stack transition model -- requiring every device, application, and network to simultaneously support both protocols -- proved commercially unacceptable. The absence of a forcing function meant organisations could continue with CGNAT indefinitely.
IPv8 is intended to solve this by having IPv4 backwards compatibility.
Management Philosophy
As stated here in the draft:
The central operational concept in IPv8 is the Zone Server -- a paired active/active platform that runs every service a network segment requires: address assignment (DHCP8), name resolution (DNS8), time synchronisation (NTP8), telemetry collection (NetLog8), authentication caching (OAuth8), route validation (WHOIS8 resolver), access control enforcement (ACL8), and IPv4/IPv8 translation (XLATE8).
When first reading this I was amazed but thinking about it further made me skeptical. Stuff like DNS, NTP, Whois, ACL and XLATE makes sense and OAuth is also nice for businesses but centralized log collection? That just makes me question security and stuff like guest networks: what is really logged with this? Because this draft is in its early stages this is not defined. Probably will be interesting.
Address Space
This draft is strange. The IPv8 Address Format is r.r.r.r.n.n.n.n where r.r.r.r is the ASN and n.n.n.n is the host address. This means there is space for 2^32 (4,294,967,296) ASNs with 2^32 (4,294,967,296) host addresses each. I think an r.r.r.n.n.n.n.n approach would be better because this we could have 2^24 (16,777,216) ASNs - which is more than enough - with 2^40 (1.09951163e12) host addresses each.
Lets do the math for an ISP with about 8 million (2^23) customers:
r.r.r.r.n.n.n.n
for an ISP with 2^23 connected households would be
2^32 / 2^23 = 512 hosts per household.
r.r.r.n.n.n.n.n
for an ISP with 2^23 connected households would be
2^40 / 2^23 = 131072 hosts per household.
It could just be that it is just because I like IPv6 but 512 hosts sounds like not-so-much.
CGNAT
The section "Requirements for a Viable Successor" states that CGNAT will continue to work. While this is essential for this drafts procols success I just feel like it should also be included that CGNAT isn't required and NAT in general wouldn't be required with this. Just to prevent ISPs putting NAT infront of this like with IPv6.
Cost Factor (CF) Routing
One of the more interesting parts of this draft is the Cost Factor (CF) metric. The draft describes it as combining
the dynamic composite path quality of EIGRP, the accumulated cost model of OSPF, and proportional load balancing across multiple paths -- in a single open versioned algorithm that operates end-to-end across AS boundaries. OSPF and EIGRP stop at the AS boundary. CF does not.
The physics floor is a neat idea:
no path can appear better than the speed of light over the great circle distance allows.
But I have questions. CF is measured from TCP session telemetry - what happens with encrypted traffic? And the economic policy component means money flows directly into routing decisions. Who controls that? When major carriers enter their own peering costs into the algorithm, this effectively results in commercial favoritism toward certain routes. This is structurally similar to the net neutrality debate, only buried deeper in the stack.
Conclusion
Sounds nice! I just have the three problems like said above:
- Missing definition of NetLog8 (will certainly come soon).
- Address formatting (4 billion ASNs? Incase half the world wants one? WHY?)
- Net neutrality is really important (espesially for our democracy)